Intentions

In addition to working as University teacher, entrepreneur and creator of IT start-ups,  throughout my life I have participated in numerous wilderness adventures in both horizontal and vertical environments. We are living in an increasingly virtual world, in which everything has to happen faster and faster. I am convinced that outdoor sports can act as an antidote to this virtual space where young people today are often massively entrenched. And preferably not the craziness of extreme sports, where young people challenge each other and themselves, but an activity in which they open themselves to the silence and the rhythm of their footsteps or the sound of skis gliding over snow. In this way they discover their own inner music and who they really are and how they can start to become effective actors of change in today’s world. The next step is meditation, unless no, this process might actually be meditation in itself. To enable such modern maneuvers, we set up the non profit association capexpe.org, a community of adventurers. Cap Expe encourages us all to dream of an adventure and realize it easily and inexpensively. Rather than buying an ‘all inclusive’ prefabricated adventure, including the photos to be published on Facebook, the Cap Expe community empowers novice adventurers to come up with their own plan and execute a trip themselves. We share gear and experience, and we train these young adventurers – female and male – to become self-reliant in risk management, which is necessary for these types of outdoor activities.

Pursuing the same objectives for a wider audience, I am immersing myself in making films. First I co-organised and took part in paraplegic Arthur’s Alaskan adventure portrayed in the film entitled “Le Pouvoir des Rêves” [The Power of Dreams] (access code : capexpe). More recently, my film “The Nahanni Whisperer” recounts a packraft journey on the Nahanni river in the Northern Territories in Canada to climb the Lotus Flower Tower with four other friends. Loïc and the Flolopapys is a documentary about three avid climbers who join together to form the the inseperable “Flolopapys”. Watch as they take on climbing adventures where they support and compliment each other with humor, friendship and fragility.

Originally in this Altai project, I wanted to gather friends from different previous expeditions to explore the high summits of Altai on skis together from a yurt used as a base camp, while asking them the following question: « Why in our modern society that is everyday becoming more and more virtual and is openly rejecting any risky behavior, do we see more and more people engaging in hazardous adventures to reconnect with the wilderness and with themselves?” For many reasons the original project never took off and I unexpectedly ended up alone adventuring with just one colleague, the 19 year old Damien. If local herders helped us setting up our high altitude base camp, a tiny yurt in an expansive terrain of snow in the Altai at the border between China, Russia and Mongolia, we were rapidly left alone, isolated for several weeks. Opening up to this vastness, we quickly become confused by the borderless white plains: « If you think it’ll take an hour, allow two. If you think it’ll take a day, allow two. » To survive together, jointly defying all risks, we had to readjust, conclude a pact and bridge our age differences. With this movie, I want to share this incredible slow nomadic journey at the heart of this magnificent Altai highlands that expanded our vision and made us enter in a space of meditation. Damien indeed, once liberated from the electronic appendages of his time, immediately entered into resonance with the Altai Mountains of the Tavan Bogd, the Five Saints. It is he who opened the door to the sacred dimension of these places and the interaction that its inhabitants nurture with them. Let us follow him.